In God's Country
by xahra99
Summary: Mitchell just wanted to be part of something human again...


In God's Country

A Being Human fan fiction by xahra99

A thin layer of mist hung over the meadows beside the river. Cattle grazed knee deep in fog, oblivious to the battle raging only fields away. The song of a nightingale in the hedgerow was abruptly drowned out by the rattle of rifle fire.

The remnants of the 44th Division, 2nd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment lay in a ditch and conversed in hushed voices.

"Where's the Major?"

"Dead."

"Where's the sergeant?"

"Dead."

"Where's the corporal?"

"Killed."

"Lance corporal?"

Mowatt shook his head. "Just us."

"Who knows which way to go?"

"I do." said Mitchell.

Four unwashed, unshaved, blood-spattered faces swiveled around to look at him. "You what?"

Mitchell sighed. One of the things he had discovered since dying was that he could always, _always_ tell where the sun was. Even now, in the cool of the early June morning, it was like a nail in the back of his skull. "Dunkirk, right? North. Well, north-by-northwest, to be exact."

There was a pause. The air smelt of marsh mud and cordite. Mitchell looked at the hopeful faces to either side of him.

"Which means?"Private Dean asked.

Mitchell jerked a thumb to his left. "That way,"

"We'll follow you," Mowatt said.

Mitchell recognized all four of the men from his company, but he didn't know them well. Mowatt was the only one he remembered speaking to before the battle of Mont-des-Cats, and even that had only been 'Hello.' Still, they fell in behind him as he climbed out of the ditch. A plane circled high overhead. All five soldiers ducked instinctively. But either it hadn't seen them or it wasn't looking, because after a while it flew slowly off to the south.

They set off in silence. The fields and grazing cattle faded into the distance behind them, an island of tranquility in a world going abruptly, violently mad.

Mitchell wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he was doing back in France.

It was six days, two months and twenty-two years since Mitchell had died, some ninety miles south of the Flanders fields in which he now found himself. The landscape was far prettier than he recalled. It was all a world away from the marshy shell-scarred craters of the Somme.

The war felt the same.

In fact, it was almost too much the same. Mitchell's army-issue boots were date-stamped '1920'. His rifle was the same bolt-action model as he'd used in the Great War. And he wasn't a military tactician or anything, but surely it wasn't a great idea to drive to war in hastily-repainted civilian trucks?

He'd enlisted partly out of hunger (Herrick had taught him that there were always opportunities for vampires during wartime) and partly out of frustration with the vampire clans. But if he was being honest (and he usually was) Mitchell had to admit that he just wanted to be part of something human again.

It wasn't working.

The enlisting part had been easy. There was a joke that the Army was so desperate for recruits even a corpse could join up. Mitchell was the living proof that it was true. He'd picked the Royal Sussex because they'd been posted in Ireland at the time, spent two weeks at a training camp and been shipped out with the British Expeditionary Force in early May.

Joining up had been the _easy_ part.

Mitchell hadn't been in the army since 1914. He had forgotten how difficult it was to live with that many humans. And yet, the more he did it, the easier it got. Mitchell had picked up little habits, _human_ habits that he had lost in those interim years with Herrick. He liked that.

Somebody tugged at his elbow. Mowatt again. "How far?" It seemed that Mitchell was the man with the answers.

"Miles."

"Bloody hell. We're lost."

"We're where we're supposed to be," Mitchell said, "but nobody else is."

"Story of my life." Mowatt groaned.

"We're lost?" Allen asked. He was the youngest of the five. He said he was eighteen, but Mitchell had a strong suspicion that he'd lied about his age just to join up. He had even stronger suspicion that the poor bugger was regretting his decision.

"He knows the way." Mowatt said, pointing at Mitchell in a not entirely reassuring manner. The British Army existed on a clear-cut chain of command. It was simple to obey an order. Giving them required thought.

"We'll find a truck." Private Dean said.

Mowatt sniffed. "Are you crazy? There's no trucks."

"We should stay off the roads." Mitchell interjected. "They'll be full of Germans."

Mowatt nodded. "Like he said. Besides, we've got no trucks left."

Dean snorted.

They walked on. Mitchell went on point and the rest followed, spread out and in silence, rifles ready. The mist cleared as they walked. The other men loosened their cuffs and rolled up their sleeves. Mitchell turned up his collar against the sun. The landscape was frighteningly similar to England, fences, fields…and, off to the left a shell crater and a truck blasted into a tree.

Dean pointed at the suspended vehicle triumphantly. "You said there were no trucks."

"Usable trucks, Allen." Mowatt snapped.

The truck hung on its side with its passenger door dangling down. Branches protruded from rips in the canvas roof. Its windows had been shattered. Broken glass littered the ground. Mitchell looked to the right and saw a track leading behind a scruffy thicket of thorn trees. He would have dismissed it as nothing more than a cattle track if it had not been for the khaki canvas that jutted, flat and alien, from the shrubbery.

Allen pushed ahead. "There's trucks!"

Mitchell grabbed his arm. "Wait!' He felt the pulse pounding in Allen's arm, just above the elbow, and hastily released him. "Wait," he said again, quietly.

"Why?"

"It doesn't smell good."

Allen looked at Mitchell, then back at the trucks. Mitchell thought the boy would ignore him and carry on, but the intensity of Mitchell's voice held him in place.

Mowatt turned and sniffed the air, picking up what Mitchell's more acute vampire senses had already registered. "Smells like pork."

They rounded the hedge carefully, and found the trucks.

There wasn't just one truck; there was a line of them, parked one behind the other in a narrow sunken lane. They were burnt out. Corpses slumped in every driver's seat. Charred canvas flapped in the breeze. Flies buzzed around the convoy.

Allen raised his arm over his face. "Bloody hell."

"Jesus," Mitchell said softly. He welcomed the small profanity even as it left his mouth. It made him feel human.

Private 'Todd' Sweeney, the fifth man of the motley crew, stumbled around the corner. He took one look at the column and vomited.

There was just enough space for one man to pass between the wing mirrors of the trucks and the soft earth of the bank. Mitchell moved down the path. Flakes of burnt paint stuck to his uniform. "There's nothing left."

"Bloody hell," Mowatt said, kicking at melted tires that had stuck to the rims. "Dive bomber. They never had a chance."

Mitchell fumbled for a cigarette in his breast pocket. He drew out a roll-up and lit up, hands shaking. The scent of the nicotine drowned out the lingering smell of death.

"You shocked?" Allen asked shyly.

Mitchell stuffed his hands back in his pockets. "No." He could use some blood, of course, but then he always could these days. Cigarettes were a far more acceptable addiction. "Want one?"

Allen smiled briefly and took the cigarette. "Ta."

They passed the rollups around and followed the lane until it dog-legged and headed south. There was a small orchard to the north. Mitchell slipped in among the trees and the others followed.

"Bloody Germans." Mowatt hissed.

Mitchell slowed his pace so that the other soldier could catch up with him. "Yeah," He slid a sidelong glance at Mowatt. The private looked shaken. "Where you from?" Mitchell asked, trying to put him at his ease.

"Brighton. You?"

"Dublin." Mitchell said briefly. He preferred hearing about other people's problems to discussing his own history. Part of the problem, of course, was that he had so much to discuss.

"Thought I recognized the accent."

Mitchell grunted. He'd tried hard to hang on to his accent, but it was just another shred of his humanity, peeling off piece by piece like the tattered canvas of the ruined trucks. Sure, he still looked human, but it had taken him the best part of twenty years to work out what he had missed.

"What're you doing in the Sussex?"

"Right place at the right time." Mitchell said. When Mowatt continued to look puzzled, he explained. "You just joined? Then you wouldn't know. They were posted in Ireland before this whole thing started."

Mowatt looked disgruntled that Mitchell had not chosen his home regiment for its obvious superiority. "That all?"

"I just liked the motto." Mitchell lied. In fact, he found the regiment's official motto, 'Nothing Succeeds like the Sussex' amusing, but not quite as amusing as the regiment's nickname, the Haddocks. The origin of both was mercifully lost in the mists of time. He changed the subject. "How many of us got out from Mont-des-Cats?"

Mowatt looked at the men picking their way through the gnarled trees behind them and shrugged.

"We can't be all there is." Mitchell said.

"Maybe we're all that's left of the whole fucking British Army."

"Then we're screwed," Mitchell took a long drag on his roll up.

"This was a fuckup from the start."

"Can't argue with that."

They left the apple trees behind them and headed north over the fields. There were shell holes in the ground to the west. A dead cow sprawled next to them, bloated with gas. The roof of a half-demolished cottage loomed stark against the blue sky. Further south a ruined church tower jutted into the sky like a fang.

Mitchell finished his cigarette. He ground it out on the butt of his rifle and dropped it into the grass. "Back in Belgium," he said, "we were patrolling past a little cottage. Looked a bit like that one, except it was still standing. And then this little old lady comes out and screams blue murder at us. Looked like my gran. Started gabbling at us in that foreign language. We had this soldier that spoke French, but he was killed at the Mont. I asked him what she was saying and he said 'Get off my lawn.' It was a fucking war zone, right? Get off my lawn!"

Mowatt sniggered. "Guess that's just what this whole thing's about. This war. This place." He gestured around at the fields. "It's just a bigger lawn. Only difference is that the old lady wouldn't have shot you!"

"Oh, you didn't see her." Mitchell said. He gestured at his upper lip "She had a moustache."

Mowatt laughed. "They didn't _all_ have moustaches!

Mitchell recognized a hook when he heard one. "Really?"

"I met a girl in Armentieres. She was called Marie." He fumbled in the pocket of his battledress. "I have a picture here-"

Mitchell heard the crack of a rifle. Allen crumpled at the knees and fell over very slowly.

The British soldiers dived for cover.

Mitchell lingered to check that Allen was all right. He wasn't all right. He was as about as far from being all right as it was possible to be. He was dead. A bullet had passed through his helmet. Thankfully, it hadn't bled much. Mitchell was grateful for small mercies. He let Allen's head drop to the soil and threw himself to his belly in the grass beside Mowatt.

"What the fuck do we do now?" Mowatt hissed between his teeth.

A skylark sang in the silence. Yellow flowers of ragwort bobbed above Mitchell's head. "Take cover," he hissed back, as if they weren't doing that already. He raised his rifle and fired a few warning shots without even knowing what he was aiming at.

"Those bloody Germans. Why don't they just leave us alone?"

"It's war." Mitchell hissed back. Through the flowers, he could see grey uniforms moving. Germans. He raised himself on his elbows and sighted down the rifle. Taking aim, he gently squeezed the trigger. A German dropped out of sight. The rest looked wildly around. Mitchell flopped back into the cover of the flowers. He clutched the rifle close to his chest. Grass tickled his nose. He fought an absurd urge to sneeze.

"Good shot." Mowatt said. "Hey, didn't you win some company sharpshooting prize or something?"

"In Belgium." Mitchell said absently. Those things had mattered to him once.

Mowatt raised his own rifle. He fired and sighed philosophically. "Missed. You know, I always wondered. Were you in the IRA or something?"

Mitchell rolled to his side, behind a small hillock that he would have dismissed as a molehill if it wasn't preventing him getting shot. "I don't even know how to tell you just how many things are wrong with that."

Mowatt looked puzzled.

Mitchell sighed. The whole situation seemed vaguely surreal. "To start with, the IRA's in Northern Ireland. And if I was in the IRA, do you really think I'd be here fighting for the British Army?"

"Guess not."

Mitchell raised his eyebrows.

Mowatt looked sheepish. "Jesus, I'm sorry... It's just that you hear stories..."

Mitchell frowned. The skylark had fallen silent. In its place was a deep noise, a rattling, rumbling noise.

"Quiet!"

"What-"Mowatt asked.

"Shut up!" Mitchell hissed. "What the hell is that?"

And then, suddenly, he knew.

The English newspapers had said that the German tanks were built from cardboard. They had lied. To Mitchell and the rest of the soldiers, hiding in the grass, the tank looked about twenty feet tall.

Mowatt's mouth dropped open. "It's a bloody tank!"

Mitchell dived to the ground. "Get down!" He lay on his stomach with his face pressed into the sandy soil. He could smell the stench of the tank: motor oil, diesel and smoke, and under it all, a hint of salt. The salt meant that Dunkirk beach couldn't be far. Dunkirk meant safety.

If Mitchell had been a religious man, he would have prayed. If he had been a more sensible man, he wouldn't have even been in France. But he was neither, so he shoved Mowatt to the side and got to his feet with the vague idea of drawing some of the fire so the others could make it out. He wasn't entirely sure that he'd survive if he got hit but a tank shell, but he sure as hell had a better chance of surviving the blast than Mowatt and the rest of the company.

It was a pity that the Germans had already aimed the turret gun.

The shell went off just as Mitchell straightened up. It missed him by twenty meters. It wasn't enough.

There was a terrifying noise, a very loud bang, and then silence.

Mitchell woke up on his back, half-buried in dirt. He stared up at the sky. The sky was blue and there were birds. The birds flew around and around, circling and swooping and fading in and out until Mitchell blinked and there was nothing but blue sky. Consciousness seemed a very long way away. He was tired. There was soil in his mouth. He coughed, trying to clear it. As he coughed he inhaled and smelt a thick red smell in the air. The smell caused a flood of saliva in his mouth.

There had been somebody with him.

Mitchell kicked off the dirt and rolled over. Private Mowatt was lying beside him. Mowatt didn't look good. He lay on his back with his arms folded tightly over his chest. A spreading stain dyed the fabric of his shirt.

Mitchell's hands began to shake.

Mowatt coughed. His skin was a waxy grey color. Mitchell recognized the shade. Mowatt was dead; he just didn't know it yet.

Mitchell crawled to a sitting position and gently removed Mowatt's hands from the wound. It didn't look like much: just a small hole in his jacket welling blood. It didn't look like much more once Mitchell had unbuttoned Mowatt's shirt, but the blood did not stop. Mowatt's grey pallor grew more pronounced.

Mitchell shrugged his pack from his shoulders and rummaged around for a field dressing. His fingers touched the hard edge of his first-aid kit. It was pristine, unused. He grabbed it out and flipped the lid. The dressings were on top. He grabbed one and pressed it down over Mowatt's stomach. The dressing was red within seconds. Mitchell grabbed another. Mowatt groaned. Blood bubbled from his mouth and soaked into the soil. If Mitchell hadn't known exactly how much blood a human body could lose he'd have been surprised.

A trickle of Mowatt's blood ran over his knuckles and he sucked at it. It tasted flat, dead, like Belgian beer with the fizz gone out of it. It did no good.

"Morphine."Mowatt groaned.

The morphine was at the back of the pack in a small syringe. Mitchell twisted off the cap and stabbed the needle deep into Mowatt's leg, knowing that the other soldier wasn't likely to live long enough to enjoy its full effects.

He changed the dressing again. It was the last one. Mowatt fumbled weakly to hold the dressing on. Mitchell let him. As Mitchell withdrew his hand, his fingers brushed Mowatt's pulse. It was jumpy and weak. Mowatt was fading fast.

The air smelt of blood.

Mitchell heard shouting in German. They weren't far off. He crouched amidst the yellow flowers and looked around for his rifle. It was missing, perhaps buried in the soft earth that had half-covered him. Mowatt's gun was nowhere in sight. A quick rummage through Mitchell's pack revealed a handful of bullets but no more weapons. By then Mitchell's hands were shaking so badly that the bullets dropped through his hands and sank into the soil.

Mitchell sat back on his heels, leaning imperceptibly away from the supine body of his comrade. He closed his eyes. Blood thundered in his ears. Time seemed to have stopped. He knew that his eyes were changing, darkening. He screwed up his face and closed his eyes tightly. Somewhere above him the skylark was singing again. Mowatt gasped irregularly.

Mitchell felt a great sense of despair. The rest of his unit was probably dead, but his senses were too soaked with blood to detect any traces of them and even if he could, the Germans were too close to them for it to make any difference.

_Let the humans kill each other_. Herrick had said when Mitchell left. _Why should it make any difference to us? It's just an easy meal. Anyway, it'll happen again. It always happens again._

But Mitchell had left anyway.

Back in London it had been easy to tell himself that he was doing the right thing. Now, kneeling in Flanders mud for the second time in his life, Mitchell wasn't so sure.

Mitchell heard a thunderous noise to his right and realized that it was the tank moving into position. He knew what to do. He was no longer afraid.

He reached over and yanked Mowatt towards him by the sleeve of his uniform. Mowatt put up no resistance. His eyes were closed. The shadows of the sockets looked abnormally dark against his clammy face.

The morphine gave Mowatt's blood a strange taste, but it was worth it when Mitchell stopped his heart. He hadn't taken a life in weeks, and the vitality of the blood made him giddy.

It seemed like years before Mitchell pulled back from Mowatt's corpse but in reality it was little more than a few minutes. Mowatt's face was sunken, the bite mark in his neck indistinguishable beneath smears of blood and dirt.

_All I did was give him a quicker death than he would have had otherwise_. _Was that so wrong?_

Mitchell thought that it probably was.

He hated himself. That was nothing new: the cycle was always the same. He'd feed, he'd reproach himself and he'd promise never to do it again.

He always, always would.

One of the rules Mitchell had made for himself when he'd joined was not to kill Allied soldiers. But the truth was that everybody's blood tasted the same, French, German or English.

He dragged a bloody hand down his face and wondered what the hell to do next.

The decision was made for him. Mitchell was still making up his mind when somebody poked him in the back with a rifle butt. "Get up!"

The voice was heavily accented. Mitchell turned around to face its owner. He was German, that much was obvious. He wore a grey uniform with a Nazi insignia that Mitchell wasn't familiar with and he held a gun pointed at Mitchell's chest.

The German gestured with the barrel of his gun. "Hande hoch!"

Mitchell rose to his feet. He obediently raised both hands into the air, wiping them across his mouth as he moved. There must have been enough blood on his face already that the German soldier didn't notice the gore smeared over his mouth.

The German smiled. "Tommy, for you the war is over."

Mitchell looked down at Mowatt's body and back up at the German. He closed his eyes and fought against the blackness, keeping it in check, tamped down for when it was needed.

"Weapons?"

Mitchell shook his head. His pack lay down in the hole besides Mowatt, spilling its contents among the yellow weeds.

The German came to stand in front of him. He gestured at Mitchell's watch. Mitchell lowered his arm, keeping his eyes on the German's gun. The buckle was clogged with blood. He took the watch off and handed it to the German. A plane circled lazily in the blue sky overhead. Both men looked up as the drone of the engine split the sky.

"One of yours?" Mitchell asked.

The German smiled. "One of ours. You have lost." He lowered his rifle, secure in the role of the victor. Mitchell looked around for other soldiers. There were none, Allied or Axis.

"The others?"

"Dead."

"All of them?"

"All. You are lucky, Englishman."

"Irish," Mitchell said softly.

"What?" The German prodded him in the back with the rifle. Mitchell gritted his teeth and wondered how to kill him.

"I said that I'm Irish."

The German frowned. "Irish?"

Mitchell guessed that he had reached the limits of the man's linguistic capability. "Eire?" he offered, then resorted to clichè. "Ireland. Dublin. Guinness. Potatoes."

The German settled his rifle more securely under his arm. "No more talking, Tommy."

"No," Mitchell said, and he tugged the startled soldier towards him, and bit him in the neck.

The soldier died so quietly that none of his colleagues noticed for at least ten minutes. The tank had headed off north, along the road to Dunkirk. Mitchell stalked the two remaining soldiers through the woods.

They died bravely, if not well.

When the Germans were all dead Mitchell left the road behind. It took him an hour, filthy, unarmed and covered in blood, to walk the five miles to Dunkirk. He circled the town itself and crested the dunes between the ports of Calais and Dunkirk. It was the third of June.

There were no trucks. There were no soldiers. There were no boats. Only the corpses of slaughtered horses, a few dead men bobbing in the surf and burnt out houses studding the seafront like rotten teeth.

"Figures," Mitchell said to himself, and he began to walk south.

Author's Note:

Yet another depressing war story, complete with ironic U2 title. This one's dedicated to my grandfather Harold, who actually made it back from Dunkirk, and the 68,000 troops that ended the 1940 war in Flanders, one way or another.

Historical Notes: The Sussex were actually in Ireland at the beginning of the 'phoney' war, (the Royal Hertfordshire, Herrrick's old regiment, had been disbanded after the Great War) and they did join the British Expeditionary Force and take part in the battle at Mont des Cats on the 29thof May. Again, no disrespect is meant to any veterans of the conflict or their relatives. The Sussex were mostly evacuated from Dunkirk, but any British troops left in France after 2am on the 3rd of June had effectively missed the boat...


End file.
